Living in the midst of aristocracy and privilege and caste, Burns was a democrat that believed in the equality of man. It required no books or professors, or theories to teach him the injustice of the social conditions under which the world has ever lived. Here, as elsewhere, he looked to the heart—a teacher infinitely more honest and reliable than the brain. If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave, By Nature’s law design’d; Why was an independent wish E’er planted in my mind? If not, why am I subject to His cruelty, or scorn? Or why has man the will and pow’r To make his fellow mourn? Preachers and authors and teachers, judges and professors and lawyers, have been employed for ages to teach the justice of slavery and the folly and crime of equal rights; but through all quibbles and evasions, this question of Burns, straight from the heart, as well as the head, shows that all these excuses are but snares and cheats. The voice of the French Revolution could not fail to move a soul like that of Robert Burns. This great struggle for human liberty came upon the world with almost the suddenness of an earthquake, and with much of its terrors, too. Here the poor and the oppressed felt the first substantial hope for freedom that had pierced the long, dark centuries since history told the acts of men. To the oppressors and the powerful, who hated liberty then as they ever have, before and since, it was a wild, dread threat of destruction and ruin to their precious “rights.” When the struggle commenced, Burns was enjoying the munificent salary of Fifty pounds a year as a whisky gauger in the village of Dumfries. He had already spent a winter in Edinburgh, and had been feted and dined by the aristocracy and culture of Scotland’s capital without losing his head, although at no small risk. An acquaintance and entertainer of the nobility and an incumbent of a lucrative office, there was but one thing for Burns to do; this was to condemn the Revolution and lend his trenchant pen to the oppressor’s cause; but this course he flatly refused to take. He openly espoused the side of the people, and wrote the “Tree of Liberty,” one of his most stirring songs, in its defense. Upon this tree there grows sic fruit, Its virtues a’can tell man; It raises man aboon the brute, It mak’s him ken himsel’ man. Gif ance the peasant taste a bit, He’s greater than a lord man. King Louis thought to cut it down When it was unco sma’ man; For this the watchman cracked his crown, Cut aff his head an’ a’ man.